


A Little Cold

by greerwatson



Series: Depths of Cold [1]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Backstory, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-18 13:37:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18121664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greerwatson/pseuds/greerwatson
Summary: For the Leonard Snart who appeared inThe Flashto evolve into the man who blew up the Oculus, there had to be good in him.   And it had to come from somewhere.Part One:   When his dad goes to prison, Lenny and his mother go to live with his grandparents.





	A Little Cold

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rivulet027](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rivulet027/gifts).



His early years were the foundation of Leonard Snart's life.  Yet, decades later, he saw them only through bruise-blue spectacles.  He had scant memories of life before his father went to prison.  Most of what he knew came secondhand:  from his mother when she was angry; from his grandparents, when they spoke of their son-in-law, which was seldom; and from comments dropped by his father after his release.  But he had a memory—he thought it was a true memory—of a barbecue in the backyard, and running across the grass to Daddy, who picked him up and tossed him in the air.  When they came into the kitchen, there were empty bottles on the counter.  They chinked as his father dumped them in the trash with a sneer.

Lewis was a cop’s cop.  He hung out after work with the rest of the boys in blue; and his buddies came round once a week for beer and poker.  There was a large yard with a patio for parties, where he sizzled the steaks as his wife entertained.  Hadley Avenue was in a nice neighbourhood that had been built between the wars.  Tall, leafy trees lined the streets; and the house had a wrap-around porch and coloured glass trimming the windows at the front.  It was a bit above an honest cop’s salary; but Lewis was only as honest as most cops in the CCPD.  The house was, so to speak, a trophy.  In her beauty, so was his wife.  But the house came with neighbours; and Rochelle couldn’t pass in so many ways.

Things were worse after his arrest, and even more so during the publicity of the trial.  After he went to prison, she went back to her parents’ small apartment in the row house in the inner city where she had lived when she was a girl.  Her son, of course, went with her.  Lewis had called the boy “Leo”.  Her parents said “Lenny”; and she didn’t correct them.  He slept on a cot beside her bed.

Rochelle got herself a job working the cash at a supermarket across town where no one knew her.  As she got there on the bus, it was convenient that her mother could keep an eye on the boy.  Sometimes she worked the early shift, sometimes the late one; but either way, Lenny was young enough to be sound asleep by the time the grown-ups went to bed.

What her parents thought of Rochelle's return, Lenny never knew.  If they talked of it, they did so when he wasn’t there to hear.  Grammie dug into their savings to put him in nursery school, and invited the mothers of two other little boys on their street to come round for coffee so he could have friends.  She told him a story at bedtime each night, tucked him in with a kiss on the forehead, and bought a little night light so he wouldn’t be afraid of the shadows under the bed.  Gramps took him to the park, and told him tales of his own boyhood long ago.  Lenny got a quarter in pocket money every Friday, and spent it on candy.

Mommy didn’t get any pocket money, except what she kept back from her pay check.  The rest went to Grammie and Gramps to pay for her keep.

Sometimes Mommy would come into the bedroom early enough that Lenny was still awake.  At first, this mostly happened on the weekend.  Then, she did it more often, until it was almost every evening.  She’d half-hide herself behind the open closet door, take off her regular clothes down to her undies, and change into a tight glittery dress that covered mostly her middle.  Then she’d make herself up at the mirror over the dresser, with patterns on her eyelids and purply lips.  On those days, she’d go back out of the apartment again.  By the time she eventually came home, Lenny was long since asleep; and usually his grandparents were also in bed.  However, their ears were kept tuned to the sound of the key in the lock and her high-heeled shoes tapping across the linoleum.  Then there’d be voices that were often loud enough to wake Lenny, too.

Grammie come out in her dressing gown to dress her down, he thought, and giggled silently into the covers at the cleverness of his words.  “At this hour!” he heard, and “Breath stinking of liquor!”  But Mommy would say, “Why shouldn’t I have some fun?  It ain’t like Lewis can take me dancing!”  And sometimes, “I married a man with a good job and good pay.  It weren’t _my_ fault he went to the bad!”

Neither of his grandparents ever told Lenny to his face that Lewis was a bad man.  They only said it over his head to his mother.  But he knew enough to tell it was true.  Daddy was in jail; and only bad people were sent there.  Even so, his memories of Hadley Avenue were good.  They went to the park to the swings; and Daddy bought Leo an ice-cream cone from the tinkling truck.  When the circus came to town, there’d been rides and clowns and candy floss.  One afternoon, while Mommy and Gramps were both at work, he said this to Grammie during the commercials between the soap operas that she liked to watch on TV.

She was quiet for a while.  Finally, she said, “That was when Lewis was out on bail awaiting trial.  He was suspended from his job, of course, but the Union made sure he got full pay and hired the best lawyer.  He got a lot of delays on the trial.  It was nearly two years before he went to prison.”  Then she looked down at him and added, “I suppose to you it would have been a good time.  Not so much for us, though.”

That was quite a while before the phone call in the late evening that sent Gramps off in the dark to take the night bus to the police station downtown.  Lenny woke as the door slammed behind him on the way out; and, since it was not the usual row with his mother, he came out in his jammies to find out what was going on.  He found Grammie crying on the couch.  She stopped when she saw him, mopped her eyes with a Kleenex, and scolded him mildly for getting up.  Then she got him a glass of water and tucked him back in.  Still, her eyes were red and damp; and he couldn’t sleep until Gramps was back home.  He heard what they then said, or at least most of it, for they talked loud enough for their words to come quite clearly through the bedroom door.

“Deceiving us for months,” was part of it.  “Lost her job ages ago,” was another bit.  “Let me talk to her for a bit before they took her back to the cell,” was more obscure.  And he could make no sense of the complaint about her walking on the street, for surely streetwalking was the way you got anywhere in Central City unless you took the bus or owned a car.

Mommy didn’t come home at all that night.  The next day she turned up—“Brazen and unrepentant!” said Grammie—and was shown the door.  Which meant packing her clothes and make-up in her parents’ secondhand suitcase and flouncing out, saying she had friends she could stay with, “and you can keep the boy, far as I’m concerned.”

The night she left, Lenny slept in the bed instead of the cot; and the top of the dresser was clear except for his own hairbrush, a stick of gum, and the pebbles he’d put in his pocket.  However, just when he’d got used to this, Rochelle came home contrite, begged her parents’ forgiveness with promises to look for work, and the cot came out again.

She stayed for only a month before “the eyes on me”—as she put it—drove her once again out the door.  That time she left for good (or bad); and, after she was gone, his grandparents scarcely spoke of her.

So Lenny had the bedroom to himself again; and, as he'd always seen more of Grammie than he ever did of Mommy, the change made no real difference—except, of course, that he was able to sleep soundly without loud interruptions.  He woke to boiled egg for breakfast, with cereal-and-milk and a glass of juice.  He was enrolled in kindergarten, where he made friends and learned to sit still and pay attention, take turns, and share nicely.  Grammie went on the bus to the library and borrowed books he hadn’t heard before, tucking him under her arm so that he could see the pictures.  When he started saying the words himself, she thought at first that he had memorized the story till he said them aloud from books she hadn’t opened before.  The next year, he was quick to learn his letters and count—or so said the teacher on Parents’ Night, not knowing that he was already half reading before he ever had one of her lessons.  Grammie sent him to Sunday School; Gramps taught him to hit a baseball, at least some of the time; and he played out in the street with the other boys in the neighbourhood.  He got a bit more pocket money, and spent some of it on comic books about heroes from the days of World War Two, when Gramps had been a young man.

He was near the end of second grade when the policeman rang the bell to tell his grandparents that Rochelle had died of an overdose.

It was the next year that Lewis got out of prison.


End file.
